


We Were Always Headed Toward Eternity

by silenth



Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Origin Story, Vampire Alice, human jasper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27886861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silenth/pseuds/silenth
Summary: Jasper and Alice are born on the same day in 1920, into two drastically different lives. Twenty-five years later, Jasper is a wounded WWII veteran living in a boarding house in Philadelphia. One night a strange woman knocks on his door. A reimagining of their beginnings.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	1. Time is a brutal but a careless thief

They were born the same day, the same year, into two drastically different lives. They never realize that little coincidence; he was an infant, of course, and though she was grown, it takes her months to understand the concept of time and how it is measured. 

She had her first vision of him on the second day of their life. She skipped ahead she-didn't-know-how-many-years to the two of them together. He was as pale as her, with a patch of white in his blonde curls, and he's holding her and telling her he will kiss her a hundred times a day for eternity. 

It was this first vision and the hundreds following that sustained her through the long years of waiting. Eventually she saw others like them and learned the unique way they lived. She dreamed them a whole family and she knew how perfectly they would fit into it. How perfectly they would fit into each other. 

Meanwhile, he grew slowly into his human adulthood, under the thumb of his demanding father and his cowed mother. He was charming and kind and smart, with a sly sense of humor, but he never had near enough caution for her taste.

Through the 1930s, they both watched the events unfolding in the news, her with foreboding and him with excitement. His father had served, his grandfathers, and so on and so on, and so would he, in the Army, as generations of Whitlocks before him. 

She went as close to him as she dared on the day he shipped off to basic training. She watched him leap up the stairs onto the train from her spot under the last awning at the station, her fisted hands shoved deep in the pockets of her coat. It was May and too warm to wear one, but she had the hood pulled over her head and no one noticed her, not even him. 

Two days before, she had given into her concern and sent him a letter. It was their first communication, but she was too pressed for time to worry over getting the words exactly right. His mother handed it to him as he left the house; she wouldn't come to the station to see him leave her. His older brother had shipped off the month before, but Jasper had to wait until he turned 18, in 1938. 

He unfolded the letter on the train as it pulled away. It was a single sheet of paper torn out of a book. _Jane Eyre,_ he read on top of the page. The words surrounded a paragraph in the middle of the page. 

"I know you have to go. Please, please be as careful as you can. I'm waiting for you." 

The paragraph read:

"'Because,' he said, 'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me.'" 

He read it three times, puzzled over who could have possibly sent it, then folded it up and shoved it in his pocket. The message stayed with him a long time, the idea of his body knotted to some mysterious stranger, the notion that there was some other world overlaid on the reality he existed in and in that place, someone waited for him. 

He lost the page years later, somewhere in his hell of mud and blood and pain and rubble, and by the time he returned home in 1944, it was a shadowy memory in the back of his mental cupboard. 

He had been medically discharged after being shot twice, once in his abdomen, requiring the surgeons to remove his spleen, and once in his right thigh. "You don't need a spleen to shoot," he argued with the doctors. But his leg healed badly and he was sent home. He would gladly have stayed behind, crawled on his bad leg to die with his brothers. 

Out of his uniform, he felt like a collection of wounds instead of a man. His leg still troubled him and the doctors said it probably always would. They had advised him to use a cane, but he resisted most days, only giving in when it was cold or wet or both (it seemed like most days now were both). He had done something to his left ankle in France and it sometimes felt like his bones weren't set right. The first hour of every day, he had to hobble around until his leg and his ankle warmed up enough to walk on. All the winter nights he and his men had slept rough in the field had given him minor frostbite in the last two fingers on his left hand (he was right handed and took more care in guarding that hand from the cold) and those fingers were mostly numb now. He had broken his collarbone in 1941, and the pain still radiated up to his jaw and his head so it throbbed, especially late at night. He took four shots of vodka then, like medicine, and that usually did the trick.

He might not have minded all the pain, feeling like an old man at 25, if he hadn't also returned home as a failure. The mission that nearly killed him did kill four men under his command: Travis, O'Brien, Deschamps, and Mills. He had stood before them on the day he was promoted to First Lieutenant, at all of 21, and promised them that if they placed their faith in him, he would return them to their mothers and their sweethearts. And they had - even though he was young and Mills and Travis were older than he was, he was a good leader. He never expected anything from them that he didn't expect from himself. 

Except for that final thing - they had died, these four brothers, they had bled to death on the ground around him and he had lived. He had waited to die under those European stars, the ones O'Brien could read like a newspaper, explaining exactly where they were and what all the constellations meant. He had waited to die in the truck on the way to the hospital, and on the surgeon's table and in his narrow bed, from infection or from disease. And every time, he had lived. 

He lived on and on, still, through the pain and the nightmares, the weeks recuperating in the hospital in America, struggling through rehab only for the VA doctors to tell him his leg was as good as it would get, and that wasn't much. He lived while his men rotted in their graves, like his brother, dead in the Pacific in 1942, and his mother, gone shortly after his brother, bless her weak and shattered heart. 

Now, in December of 1945, the war was over and the world was at peace, supposedly. It was two weeks to Christmas. Every song on the radio was full of good will toward men and the front window of every house in Philadelphia seemed to surround a happy family with a burning fire in the fireplace. 

He had settled here after getting a letter from his second lieutenant, one of the few survivors of his men. Harrison had been one of his closest friends for the three years they served together, but peace had found him much changed. He had his own way of dealing with what the war had done to them and most of it involved regular visits to the bottom of a bottle. Dragging him out of the gutter, trying to keep him employed and halfway healthy, these were the things that kept Jasper alive, that gave him some kind of purpose. Harrison was the last soldier left in his charge and he was going to keep him marching, no matter what the cost. 

So Jasper lived on the second floor of a ramshackle boarding house in Philadelphia and worked at Schmidt and Sons's brewery, maintaining the machines with old Fritz, who had been around since the turn of the century and knew every inch of pipe in the place by feel. Fritz was the closest Jasper had to a friend, save Harrison, and they probably exchanged five words in a shift. 

This night, in December 1945, he was on his knees scrubbing his kitchen floor. It was midnight and his physical pain had been outpaced by his sadness. At times like these, he usually cleaned. The three rooms that made up his home - kitchen, bathroom, bedroom - were barren but they were always spotless. Harrison was downstairs in his own apartment, dead to the world, with a new set of bruises on his face from the barroom fight Jasper hadn't been in time to break up.

 _Failure heaped on top of failure,_ he thought to himself. His hands were raw and red and he would pay for the kneeling and the scrubbing tomorrow morning, but doing something was the only way to make the pain go away. 

_Why am I alive?_ he thought when his mind was empty. _What is the point of all of this?_ He had his pistol in the top drawer of his dresser and he tried very, very hard, on nights like these, not to think about that. That would be the final failure, the worst one. That would be like him shooting Mills and Deschamps and O'Brien and Travis himself. More, it was an escape he didn't deserve. His life was a gift he couldn't refuse. 

But still, that pistol called to him. _What will you do on Christmas?_ it asked. _Pray to a god you don't believe in for a forgiveness that will never come. Watch the world go on, celebrating peace while your men, those good men, rot in the ground and you sit here scrubbing and waiting, watching Harrison drink his life away, fixing machines so he can have more liquor to drink and--_

He heard a knock at the front door down on the first floor and he startled to his feet with a wince and a groan. It was almost midnight by his internal clock and everyone in the boarding house would be asleep but him. He hoped it wasn't whoever Harrison had fought with tonight, come back to finish the job. 

Jasper tugged on his coat and rushed downstairs as fast as his aching limbs could carry him. There was a light dusting of snow outside and when he opened the door, his mouth dropped at the sight of a woman, wearing nothing but a long-sleeved blue dress and gloves, a bright red scarf piled around her tiny neck.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said, her voice so beautiful and melodic that it pulled his eyes away from her lack of coat. "My car has a flat tire. Would anyone here be able to change it for me?" She was beautiful, even in the dim porch light, all pale skin and huge eyes, the strangest eyes he had ever seen, a deep golden color. 

"Your car?" he furrowed his brow and she smiled and turned like a dancer, extending her arm and then her tiny finger to point up the street, where a brand new black sedan was pulled over on the curb. 

He looked at her again, wondering why she was dressed like this and traveling all alone, so late at night, but it would have been an anathema to him to leave a woman stranded on the road.

"All right," he nodded. He pulled his hat and gloves from his pocket as she cheerfully turned and led him down the stairs, over the frozen walkway and the icy sidewalk. 

Alice had hesitated before knocking at the door. The future where he killed himself was always a dim and blurry one, but on nights like these, it worried her. More than that, she was finally reaching the point of no return, the moment when her years of patience would pay off. Time had sped up during the war, with all the futures she had to monitor, until she felt like she was running down a steep hill, gaining momentum every day and now she had stuttered to a stop at the bottom, because this was it, he was here with her. 

She had hoped for something a bit more candle-lit and romantic, rather than this dark and cold do-gooder errand, but seeing his face up close for the first time was romance enough for her. 

She frowned at the sound of his footsteps as they approached her car. _He should have brought his cane. He's limping worse than yesterday._ Alice had worried over him constantly during the war, even though she knew from the beginning there was a 93 percent chance he would survive. Seven percent was negligible until it meant losing the love of your eternal life. And now, he was struggling so without the framework of his military duties to guide him. 

She knew from her visions and her reading that it wasn't uncommon for returning soldiers to have these kind of difficulties. Carlisle and Edward would discuss how Carlisle's patients returned from the Front were adjusting later tonight - Alice had seen it already, eavesdropped on their conversation silently from the doorway. They had no idea she existed, of course, but she already considered Edward her closest friend, aside from Jasper. 

One day, years from now, Edward would creep through her thoughts trying to figure out how she did it - how she developed such strong feelings about people she never met. Jasper would never have to ask, she thought, watching his shadow on the ground as he followed behind her, smelling his warm fresh scent as his breath clouded in the cold air. He would understand it because he understood her. He knew what it was like to wait, even if he didn't know exactly who or what he was waiting for. 

Meanwhile, Jasper, completely unaware of Alice's thoughts and feelings, was simply glad for the interruption to his dark thoughts and dreading what the hike back up the stairs to his room would do to his leg. It was freezing cold and wet and he'd have to kneel on the icy street to change the tire and... 

_Your life is a penance, son,_ he told himself in his father's voice. _Pay it and shut up._ He caught a whiff of the strange woman's scent as he walked past her to the parked car - something about it was a little familiar. It hung heavy around her tiny frame. 

_What a strange lady,_ he thought, eyeing the bows on her shoes. She must have been coming home from a date to be so dressed up. She beamed at him as he rummaged in her unlocked trunk for the jack and the spare. 

"Thank you so much for helping me, Mr..."

"Whitlock," he muttered. He dropped the tire on the ground and turned to her holding the jack in one gloved hand. He looked at her from head to toe and back again and Alice shivered with pleasure. "Don't you have a coat?" he frowned, misinterpreting the cause of her tremor. "You're not dressed nearly warm enough." 

Alice frowned back. All the time spent picking out this ensemble and that's all he has to say? "I'm not cold, truly," she told him. 

He looked at her closer, and indeed, she wasn't shivering. The sleeves of her dress were tissue thin and he didn't see any goosebumps rising up on her arms. Still - "I insist, ma'am." He shrugged out of his heavy coat and held it out to her, fighting back his own shiver as the wind blew through his sweater. 

She narrowed her mouth in displeasure, but she took it and put it on. It hung down to her feet and the edges of his sleeves hung a foot past her wrists, but once she was wrapped up in it, another quiver went through her and her face turned up to the sky, her eyes closing and her breath misting around that angelic face. She looked like nothing less than a woman in rapture and he dragged his mind away from that thought because it was completely improper to think it about a stranger. 

Still, he couldn't stop looking at her, not when her eyes slitted open and her lips curved, so dreamy and soft. "It smells like you," she whispered, holding the sleeve up to her nose. He could see those peculiar amber eyes glowing at him - with her on the curb and him in the street, they were closer to the same height and she poured her gaze over him, apparently unconcerned that she was staring so boldly at a strange man on a deserted midnight street.

"You smell like honey," she continued in that silvery murmur. "And grass, or-- no, hay, fresh hay when the wind blows through it in the spring." 

He took a step closer to her without realizing he was doing it, leaned in a little so he could catch a whiff of that heavy rich scent that clung to her. He took a deep breath, then another. "You smell like incense," he declared, the memory returning to him in a rush. 

All the old churches he went through in Europe, the bombed out ones and the ones left standing, had this scent. He was raised Lutheran though he wasn't anything now - war had knocked the idea of God out of him, along with hope and health and everything else he took for granted when he was young - but those old buildings still felt sacred to him. He thought it had less to do with any God and more with the people that had shed their tears there, begging for mercy, for miracles or absolution. Their hopes, years of them piled on top of each other, settled in the pews and around the altars, made the places holy. 

That was what she smelled like - rich and spiced and floral, years of hoping and whispering in the dark. 

"Is that... good?" she asked. She tilted her head and watched his hair in the wind. It had grown longer since the war, long enough to peek out from under his black wool hat, and he had a patch of gray on the right side of his head that looked white in the meager starlight. He wasn't afraid of her, not a bit, and though she had known he wouldn't be, it still pleased her more than she could say.

"It's unusual," he answered carefully. "But good, I think." 

She grinned. "Oh good. I like the way you smell too." 

Well, she was direct, he had to give her that. And fearless - he was so much bigger than her, but she talked to him like an old friend. He shook his head at his pointless musings and turned away. He fit the jack into place and changed her tire as quickly as he could, lifting her flat tire back into her trunk before he slammed the lid. Funny, it looked like it had been slashed by something. After all that, his leg was paining him so badly he had to try twice to make it up to the sidewalk where she was standing. She looked at him like she wanted to say something about this, but she didn't and he was thankful. 

"I'll give you your coat back, I'm sure you'll need it tomorrow," she told him as she shrugged out of it, careful to keep it high enough that the hem didn't drag on the icy sidewalk. He reached out to still her hands and she jerked away from him, taking a big step back. 

"Sorry, miss. You keep it for the drive home. I'll be fine." He should turn and walk away but he stayed there, lingering to watch her eyes in the starlight. They were so golden they glowed like the sunrise and he wondered if they would be warm if he reached out his hands to them -- 

"I'm not cold," she retorted, the gold in her eyes turning darker and stormy. "This weather is quite mild to me, in fact. So you can take it back." 

"No." He folded his arms, refusing it. 

"I could make you take it," she muttered low and he smiled at her indignation. 

"How would you do that?" 

"Wouldn't you like to know?" she glowered. She stamped her foot at him and darted away, quicker than it seemed she should have been able to move on the icy sidewalk. She was out of reach and she held his coat over a pile of snow and icy slush. "I'll give it to you or I'll drop it here and then neither of us will want it." 

"Fine," he sighed and she threw the coat over to him, surprising him again because it seemed too heavy for someone as small as her. "Stronger than you look, I guess," he said under his breath and her smile grew wider. 

She was, and faster and older too. For her part, Alice was a little sorry to lose the coat; it was so wonderful to be wrapped up inside Jasper's scent, his homey sweet smell, to linger in the fabric warmed by his body. He was an intoxicant to her, more potent than anyone she had smelled in the past twenty-five years. Her mouth had been flooded with venom since he opened the door. She hadn't killed a human in two years, her longest streak ever, but a part of her wanted nothing more than to paint her mouth with his blood. 

"I'll miss it," she said sadly as she watched him shrug the coat on. "It smelled nice." 

"Then why didn't you keep it?" he asked, exasperated. 

"Because you need it more than I do, Jasper! You have to go to work tomorrow, don't you?" 

He narrowed his eyes. "I didn't tell you my name was Jasper," he said after a long moment. 

"Of course you did," she grinned, hitting him with the full force of her smile for the first time. When she smiled like that, he always said he was liable to give her anything. Of course, he hadn't said that once yet, but it was already an "always" to her. "How else would I know that?" 

He shook his head. He must have been standing out in the cold too long. It was 1am now and he had to be up at six to give his body time to creak itself to life before he got to work. He began his long trek back up the path to his house, pulling off his hat and raking his hand through his hair. 

"Here," he said as he turned and tossed his hat to her. "Since you like my smell so much." He knew it was a lewd thing to say to a strange woman, but her funny eyes had woken up something inside him that he hadn't felt for a long time and he knew her scent would be haunting him for months. He took another breath of her as he walked away, wishing he could bottle it for future nights like these, when he felt forgotten and lonely in this peaceful world. 

"Thank you," she called back and when he turned she was still standing on the sidewalk, her thin blue skirt blowing around her in the breeze and his hat clasped against her face. It took him ten minutes to hobble back up to his room, and by then, of course she and her car were gone. 

The street was so empty he could almost believe it had all been some elaborate fantasy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title of the story and the chapter are from the song "The Pearl," written by Emmylou Harris. I highly recommend Conor Oberst's cover.
> 
> I haven't forgotten about "You Can Put Your Bags Down," but since this story is set in December, I thought I would go ahead and try to post it this month.


	2. If There Is No Heaven, What's This Hunger For?

The next day, Jasper woke at 6am, did his prescribed stretches and exercises until his leg was only in pain, not in agony. He drove to the brewery for his regular shift as the maintenance man, fixing the broken machines. He often wished he could be reborn as a hammer or a boiler, something nerveless and without pain. A machine that never woke alone and broken because it never slept.

The five words old Fritz, the other maintenance man, gave him today were "North side," Tomorrow," and "Damn fool." The rest of their communication was entirely through nods and grunts and sighs. The "damn fool" was muttered at Harrison as his friend walked away. 

Harrison worked the afternoon shift that day and made it in on time for once. He even managed to sneak over and see Jasper before he left for the day. "Lieu, I'm sorry about last night," he muttered, wincing as he pushed his flaming red hair out of his face. His face was mottled with black and purple bruises and it hurt Jasper just to look at him. "Thank you for showing up when you did - whenever you did. I don't exactly remember." Harrison gave him a smile through his busted lips and Jasper shook his head. 

"Harrison, you have to know your limits. I didn't drag you through Europe to watch you get your head bashed in by some Dutchman twice your size in a damn bar in Philadelphia."

"You're right. I'm- I should cut back, shouldn't I?" He eyed the machines over Jasper's shoulder. It wouldn't last, they both knew. Harrison was genuinely sorry now, he always was, but tomorrow would be a repeat of yesterday. He simply couldn't stay out of the bottle for that long and it certainly didn't help working in this damn brewery. 

Jasper took the job as a temporary way to keep an eye on Harrison until he could find them both something better but Harrison had worked here before the war, with his brothers (both of them dead now, same as Jasper's) and he couldn't bear to leave the place. By then, Jasper was settled into his routine. 

Now he looked at his life and couldn't understand how it had narrowed to this empty and silent monotony. He also couldn't see how it would ever change. He felt like he lived inside a dark keyhole, only glimpsing the light on either side of the door, one way to death, the other to life. He didn't belong to either one.

He drove home and the moment he turned the corner onto his street, he saw her. She was waiting on the stairs that led from the street up to the house, wearing a black dress this time, no coat again. Her hands were fisted under her chin, her eyes bright and avid as she watched him park the car, climb out, and walk up the stairs to the boarding house on the hill. 

The extremes in her fascinated him - how little she was, so skinny but full of grace even in the way she sat there, her fingers linked together. Her pale skin in the early dark of evening, especially next to the thick blackness of her hair, no brown or red to lighten it. He thought of that movie he had taken his old girlfriend to see, a few months before he joined up. Snow White - aside from her strange and enchanting eyes, she looked a little like that.

 _You can do this,_ she reminded herself as she watched him climb the stairs, smelling the delicious sweat blooming on his face from the effort. _Just remember how you see Carlisle, how he lives. Remember Jasper holding you and laughing. You can have that if you can control yourself._

Jasper was using his cane and wished he didn't have to, but he couldn't get up the stairs without it. "Hello again. Come to return the hat?" he asked her, trying to remember how he talked to girls before the war. He thought of the girl he had taken to see Snow White - he didn't write often enough for her tastes after he shipped out and she had married - a pilot, maybe? He thought a pilot. Ole Susie.

That made him realize he didn't even know this woman's name. "I don't even know your name," he told her as he stopped a few steps below her. She rose to her feet in one elegant sweeping movement and shook out her skirts, pulling out a bouquet of white roses and red lilies she had hidden there, bound together with a red ribbon.

"A proper thank you for my car," she explained when he hesitated. Finally he reached out and took them. She was careful not to brush her bare fingers against his. She had spent the day in her hotel room, dreaming and drawing and planning, always with his hat folded down on her head or pressed against her face. The constant presence of his smell helped her, made the temptation less jarring now that she was face to face with him again.

Still, that first inhale when he got out of the car made her feel light-headed. For all his thin face was so worn and gray from lack of sleep, there was so much _life_ inside him, it was like he burned brighter than everyone around him. She couldn't understand how he didn't turn the heads of everyone he passed. When he was gone to war and she was living in Maryland, she used to sit in a church in the early, early mornings, waiting for the dawn light to shine through a stained glass depiction of three angels, looking down from heaven. The one in the middle, with huge wings and the severe expression of a holy watchman, always reminded her of him. 

She was looking him up and down, the way she had the night before, like she was preparing to draw him from memory. He should be unnerved - this woman was truly the most bizarre person he had ever met - but it made his heart pound harder. He was suddenly conscious of the rush of his blood through his veins, how much faster it moved when he was in her presence. 

"Well, thank you. No one's ever given me flowers before," he said finally, studying the bouquet in his hand. "I don't even know your name," he repeated. 

"Oh, it's Alice," she told him, like this formality was a mere detail. He held out his hand to shake hers but she ignored him and walked over to the front door, waited for him to open it. "Can't I see your room?" she asked when he only stared at her, and finally he nodded and led her up the stairs, though something in her confident steps made it seem like she already knew the way. He tried to determine why she had come here again, and finally settled on the fact that she must be some kind of do-gooder, visiting him out of pity, even though there was nothing pitying in her gaze or in the way she spoke to him.

His room was at the top of the stairs and she followed him, both of them conscious of how long it took him to climb up, one step at a time. Alice's heart broke, though she knew she had to keep that hidden from his prideful eyes. She remembered him young and she remembered him turned, but this middle place, this was the hardest. He was so shattered. That horrible, ugly war. She regretted every day that she could not find a way to save humanity from itself, or at least to save it from so much suffering. 

In her years in Washington, she had crept into the war rooms in the government buildings at night, correcting their maps and their plans, scrawling notes in the margin that the generals would take and use as their own ideas. She saved them from disaster a few times, though no one would ever know but Jasper and the Cullens. _He is to be forged in fire,_ she reminded herself. It was one of the first things she ever knew about him and it was inescapable.

His apartment was so bare. She's seen it before, through the windows, but she looked at everything closer now, trying to keep her breathing even. Being here was the biggest test she had given herself. She had to think about passing for a human in front of him and resisting the urge to kiss him and also resisting the urge to kill him. _Kiss him to death,_ she thought, and tried not to laugh hysterically at how good he smelled and how giddy she was to be this close to him. 

"Alice what?" he asked and it took her a minute to catch up. 

"Alice Smith, I suppose." 

"You suppose?" he frowned. 

He braced himself with his hand as he lowered himself slowly into his chair at the tiny table in his kitchen. He usually propped his bad leg up on the other chair, but of course, he made sure to leave it empty for her. He reached down and rubbed his thigh instead, trying to grind away the pain with the heel of his hand. 

"Yes." She ignored the empty chair and paced around the room idly. There wasn't much to see in here - he had three cups, two bowls and three plates, five cans of food, a bottle of vodka, a bag of coffee. She really wanted to go into his bedroom and talk to him from there, but that would probably be too strange. Wouldn't it? She surely can't sit beside him at that tiny table, it was much too strong a temptation. 

"I woke up in the woods, down in Mississippi." She will not lie to him about herself, if she can help it. It was imperative that he trust her, that he know her as fully as he can from the start. "I have no memory of my life before that day. I thought the memories might return in time, but they never have." 

"What did the police say?" he asked, studying her calm face. He has read about amnesia in books, but he has never seen it in real life. There were many people he encountered in the war who prayed to forget - he wished it for them, that they would forget the horrors they had experienced, but they never did. He wondered what possibly could have happened to her that she couldn't remember. 

She shrugged, turned on her heel in the middle of his floor and bounced up on the very tips of her toes to peer out his narrow kitchen window. "They had no leads. There were no reports of a missing woman that fit." 

This was true as well. She had snuck back into the police station in the late 1920s and gone through their missing person reports for the time before and after she woke up and there was nothing. No women even close to her description. 

"Strange," he murmured. "You seem like the kind of woman - the kind of person someone would miss." 

"You should put those in water," she replied, smiling as she eyed the flowers. He had laid them in the center of the table.

"I don't have a vase," he told her and she shook her head. 

He was such a man! "A pitcher will do." She eyed his counter, hoping the wood and tile were strong enough and then she hopped up and opened the cabinets until she found a glass pitcher with a chipped spout. All his things are secondhand. She wondered if he felt he deserved only the bruised, neglected things, or if he liked to take things the world had been harsh with and keep them safe from further damage. She thought it was a bit of the former but mostly the latter.

Esme was the same way, she mused as she jumped back down and turned to fill the pitcher with water. She loved to find damaged things and fix them, restore floors and furniture to the luster and gleam of their youth. She would adore Jasper so, and he would place her on a pedestal, idolizing her gentle compassion and her devotion to the family. 

Alice smiled at him again as she twirled and placed the pitcher in the center of his little table, not spilling a single drop. She began to unwind the ribbon tied around the flowers.

"How do you live, then, if you have no family?" he asked her. 

She straightened the flowers as she placed them in the makeshift vase and he studied her pale, thin fingers, watching them move so lightly the petals barely quivered.

"I travel quite a bit. I suppose I'm looking for a family, some people who will take me in." She walked backwards until she was on the other side of the small room, then tilted her head and studied the effect. "Yes, that brightens everything up quite nicely. Very festive, aren't they?" 

Jasper kept his eyes on her. "Yes, thank you. I hope you find your people," he told her and she gave him a bizarre smile, like he had said something funny instead of something meant to be nice. 

"Don't worry, I know I will." 

"But you've been alone since you woke up?"

She shrugged and looked away but he caught a flash of pain and it burned him, the thought of his poor woman, barely more than a girl-- she looked only nineteen or twenty-- abandoned and searching. "That's no life for someone like you, Alice." 

"It has been rather hard at times," she said softly, staring down at her hands. "Especially this time of year. So much togetherness, humanity, joy. All the best qualities of people. And all the families together..." She had glimpsed the Cullens through the years as they decorated their tree. Esme loved it the most, made the tree into a work of art with the ornaments the family bought her. Emmett and Rosalie had snowmen contests, competing over who could build the biggest or the scariest or the most bizarre.

"And you're watching from the outside?" he finished and she looked at him and nodded. "Do you ever feel like you're waiting for something, for your world to open up, so you can feel the things everyone else seems to feel without trying?"

Her wide eyes went even wider, her face filling with hope and wonder. He flushed and let his voice trail away, his hand working harder at his leg, like he was trying to punish himself. "I feel that way all the time," she whispered. "But I suppose it's to be expected, not having any memories, any family. What do you think you're waiting for?" she prompted when he didn't respond. 

Jasper looked down at his leg, avoiding her gaze. Alice rolled her eyes a little, placed her hand on her skinny hip and began to wait. _Let him try to avoid opening up to me,_ she thought. _No one in the world can best me when it comes to waiting. Especially waiting for him._

Finally he sighed. "I don't know what I'm waiting for, exactly. Sometimes I've felt like there is another world laid over this one, like if I could step out of this life, I would find myself in another place - I don't know. I sound like I've read too many fairy stories." He moved his hand through his hair again. 

His fingers went to his collarbone, finding the line of the break. _He always touches his wounds when he speaks of the war,_ she thought. _Even in the years to come, after his wounds were gone._

"I thought I would die in the war. I should have died," he whispered. "I can't believe I was saved for this - working in a brewery and living like this," he looked around at his empty home and then at the luminous creature standing in the middle of it, casting her light into all the dark corners. 

"I'm sure you were saved for something much finer than this," she reassured him gently. She tried to put all the warmth in her mind into her eyes and she stared at his hands, hoping he would feel like she had taken them between her own. "We both were," she finished, imagining again how their life would be in the future. 

She had shined it up as bright as a diamond, their life with the Cullens. She knew the best way to meet them, to gain their trust. She had picked out the best room for them in their house - Edward's was on the top floor and had the biggest windows -- Jasper loves that because he can always see her coming. "The way you saw me," he tells her.

"You don't know me well enough to say what I was saved for, do you?" Jasper said, his hand dropping from his collarbone. She shook her head, refocusing herself back in the present, this cold "now" where she was still a stranger.

"If you say so," she shrugged. "Would you agree _I_ deserve more then?" she said, her laugh turning sassy and sly. 

He looked at the flowers she had brought him, this small gesture of kindness that moved him so deeply. It must have been this kindness, this strange kinship he felt toward her that made him open up, share the secrets he had never tried to explain to anyone before.

"I would." He looked from her beautiful face, so perfectly made he couldn't imagine how she was still alone, to her ten ringless fingers. "You should have a life filled with good company and beautiful things." 

"That's sweet," she said, her face tilting coquettishly as she curled a lock of her short dark hair around her finger. 

He ducked his head, staring at his feet again. She seemed like a key to him, fitting into the rusted lock of his soul and turning it open, releasing all his secrets. 

It was dark outside already, being December, and the light in the kitchen was dim, but with her standing there, these rooms seemed like a home for the first time. Her dress was cut low enough that he could see the shadowy hollows of her delicate collarbones, the skin of her chest so pale it looked like she had spent her life in a silk-lined drawer, hidden from the sun like a piece of priceless art. Her smell seemed to be growing stronger every second, so heady it fogged his brain. 

"I suppose you've never had a first kiss then, have you?" he heard his voice say and he could blame her incense smell in the air and the lack of sleep and the pain in his body making him light-headed, but it was her face, her lips. They were nearly as red as the lilies, as the ribbon she had laid on his table. She shook her head. 

She slipped her hands behind her back and raised her head and he clutched his cane in his numb left hand as he walked over to her. "Are you sure?" he asked her and she nodded, keeping her teeth together to hold the laugh in her throat. 

Alice wanted him so much she felt like she would fall through the floors, through the foundation of this building and into the earth if he didn't touch her. He bent so slow, _humans move so unbearably slow sometimes,_ and kissed her top lip, then her bottom, then both of them together, his chapped lips so warm and gentle they felt like sunlight against her skin. Like he could make her glow. She kept her eyes open, drinking in his face. 

She hadn't breathed the whole time and then she worried he would notice so she forced herself to inhale but it was all him - springtime sweetness and her lover, her husband, lingering so close to her face. She was across the room at the door before he could open his eyes and straighten back up. 

"Thank you," she said as she rubbed her tongue over her bottom lip, savoring the small taste of himself he had left there. "That was perfect, Jasper. Exactly what I always wanted. Thank you," she said again and he shook his head and started to say, "My pleasure, ma'am," but she was gone.


	3. It Is The Heart That Kills Us (in the end)

The next day Jasper woke up hoping he would see Alice again. He had hoped for things since the war-- most recently for a day when Harrison didn't get too drunk to walk up stairs or a day when pain didn't bring tears to his eyes. It was strange to remember he could still hope for something good to happen, instead of something bad _not_ to happen.

All day, he wished he had thought to invite her back tonight before she ran off. She didn't seem the type to stand on pretense so she might simply show up like she had yesterday. He found himself going through his work more cheerfully than he ever had before, in spite of the fact that he woke up with a dull pounding headache again, and Fritz gave him a smile when they nodded goodbye at the end of the day, another first. 

Harrison was working the same shift as him and Jasper waited impatiently in his car at the end of the shift, silently cursing Harrison to hurry up so he could go home and see if Alice was sitting on the stairs in a new dress. Finally, Harrison swung himself onto the seat, bright-eyed and whistling despite the deep bruises on his face. 

"Date with Sylvia tonight," he reminded Jasper as he pulled out a cigarette. "And you're--" 

"Going with her friend," Jasper finished with a groan. 

Harrison had been mooning over the waitress at the local coffee shop for weeks. She didn't want to date someone who got in bar fights all the time, she told him, but she finally gave in. Harrison was like that, he had a sweetness that compelled forgiveness against the other party's better judgment. Sylvia had a waitress friend who wasn't seeing anyone special at the moment either. A double date, Harrison had proposed, and Jasper had agreed. Before he had met Alice, he had been looking forward to it, for the novelty if nothing else. 

Now he wondered if Alice would come back and wait for him and give up when he didn't show. What if he never saw her again? He cursed himself this time. He should have asked her for an address, if she had one. Maybe she just traveled the country in that car, searching for her people. He wondered how she made a living. She had brushed over that. He would have to ask her. He had laughed to himself on his way to work that morning, thinking she was so strange and mysterious, she could well be a witch. 

Alice, aware of the change in Jasper's plans before he was, was waiting in a tall pine tree by his apartment. The problem with winter was it made it harder to hide in bare-limbed trees and she would come down smelling piney and sticky with sap. 

She had seen him at the movies, of course. His date's name was Angela. She was Italian, curvy with mounds of long dark hair and a ready smile. She liked Jasper, his manners and his golden good looks, and she liked that he was a war hero, though she would make the mistake of calling him that halfway through dinner and he would go stiff and say, "I'm not a hero. The only heroes are dead." Still, she would go home hoping he would call her again.

Alice wondered if she hadn't come when she did, would Jasper have fallen in love with Angela? Would he have kissed Angela the same way he had kissed her? There was no vision where she did not come at this time, not that she had seen, anyway, but she still wondered. Angela was warm and buxom and human. Would Jasper notice the difference between them the next time he touched her? 

They were supposed to see _The Bells of St. Mary's,_ but at the last moment Harrison decided a horror movie was better. Make the girls scream and grab onto our arms, he reasoned, and they all went to see _House of Dracula._

Jasper barely paid attention through most of the date - Angela was nice, but she was normal and he was not, so it stood to reason she could do much better than him. For all Alice was, she wasn't normal. Of course, she could do better as well, he reminded himself. Probably the best thing for her would be to go and never come back to him. To leave him with his crushed and crumpled body and his memory of her scent, of her lily-soft red lips against his.

The movie was coming to the climax as he ruminated over Alice. The doctor had been turned into a vampire and no longer saw his reflection in the mirror. Jasper sat up straighter. Something nagged at the back of his mind - he remembered his earlier thought, that Alice was so mysterious she could be a witch. 

She had been cold, hasn't she, when he kissed her. She felt so wonderful he had scarcely noticed, but she was cold. And pale. And fast and strong and strange. He told himself he was being ridiculous through the end credits, but he knew he wouldn't get the idea out of his mind until he saw Alice again. 

Harrison and Sylvia were going dancing, but he had begged off, claiming he couldn't go because of his leg. Normally he never used that as an excuse, but he could picture the stairs that led to the boarding house and Alice sitting there, waiting for him. He barely remembered how he left things with Angela. He barely remembered anything about the night except the scenes of the movie where the doctor had horrible visions of his life as a vampire. He tried to superimpose Alice's perfect heart-shaped face, those captivating golden eyes, onto the man's ugly one but he couldn't do it. Then he turned the corner and exactly as he had imagined, she was there, waiting for him.

Alice watched him climbing with his cane and she noticed the warmth in his face from yesterday had cooled. She wondered if it was only his obvious physical pain that had stolen it. He nodded at her and gestured to the front door, following slowly behind her. She thought of her vision of his evening and wondered what had caused the change in his mood. Perhaps he had found Angela more appealing than it seemed in her head. She hunched her shoulders and forced herself not to hurry, not to race up the stairs ahead of him. 

She had once seen a sixty percent chance he would kiss her as soon as he closed the door to his apartment behind them. But instead, he walked over to the kitchen window, glanced at her like he wanted her to follow. She did. She had killed a cow that morning, to keep herself full all night long and to keep her eyes bright gold so he wouldn't notice any change in them. She went and stood beside him, both of them staring at their faces in silence.

He looked at her pale reflection against the dark night squared in the window, and he sighed. He was being ridiculous. Then he reached out and brushed his thumb over her chin. She was soft, her skin so smooth and _cold_. He was a soldier, after all, and he knew dead when he felt it. He should have known it earlier.

"We saw _House of Dracula_ at the movies tonight," he told her and her mouth dropped open in shock, one of the first shocks of her life. "Alice, what are you?" 

She turned away from him, stared down at the ground. She had worn her best shoes, the ones she had worn the first night, the ones with bows on them. She had worried he would notice the difference between her and a human woman, but she had never thought a motion picture would be the thing that tipped him off. She wondered why he didn't seem afraid of her, even now. But it was never in him to be cruel, especially to her. 

"What do you think I am?" she whispered to her shoes. 

"I can see your reflection," he said like it was a question, and she sighed, her throat seizing with pain so the air could barely come through. 

"That's just a myth. Those stories are so silly. They're full of lies." 

"I can't kill you with garlic either?" 

"Do you want to kill me then, Jasper?" she asked and she felt his hand clasp the back of her neck.

_How can she be dead and yet so bright and kind?_ he wondered. _Why does her cold skin feel so right under my hands? How could she be a demon and smell like the holiest of places?_

"Of course I don't." He tried to turn her around but she is much heavier than her small frame would indicate. "Let me see you." 

"You want to stare at a monster?" Her voice sounded far away - she was frantically flipping through futures in her mind. They were supposed to spend the night talking, sharing more secrets about their lives, and kissing, those sweet, chaste kisses of first love. But now the future was changing second by second with every answer she gave. He was never meant to figure out the truth like this, she had spent years planning the best words to use to tell him when the time came and instead he figured it out from some _picture show._

"I want to see your face," he whispered against the nape of her neck. 

She turned at that, slowly, her face tight and tortured, her eyes darker than he had seen them before, the rich golden color of wild honey.

He looked at her for a long moment and then he smiled a little. "You're not a monster at all, are you, Alice," he told her, caressing her cheek, her neck, his hand hot and tender against her skin. 

She closed her eyes, turned into his hand to brush her lips against his fingers. Her face was so joyous for an instant, the face of a young sweetheart on her wedding day, before the pain came back into it. "I'm not entirely dead, but I'm not alive either."

"I feel the same," he told her, because he did. Since he had returned home, he had not passed a single day without feeling like he had taken a wrong turn somewhere, that he should have died and his brother or one of his fallen men, Mills or Travis or Deschamps or O'Brien, should be alive instead. That he wasn't mean to be here. "Is that why do you keep returning to me?"

She hesitated, leaning away so he was no longer touching her. "I come back to be with you," she answered at last.

"That simple?"

"And that complicated," she sighed, moving away from him as quickly as she could, until she stood on the far side of his kitchen table. 

To his eyes, it was like she had disappeared from one place and reappeared on the other side of the room. He looked around for a moment, then spied her. He moved closer, allowing her to keep the table between them. "Not to kill me then?" he asked, his face serious but unafraid. 

"I would never, never raise my hand to harm you, Jasper," she vowed, drawing herself even straighter than her normal perfect posture, clasping her hands in front of her heart. _"Never."_

He reached over the table, placing his fingertips on her wrist and she bit her lip as she watched him, unable to make herself pull away again. She was conscious now, more than she had been in decades, of how still and pale she was. Her whole body was flawless, stronger and more superior to his in every way - except that his churned and pulsed with life. He seemed more aware of the difference too, drawing her hand out, staring at her wrist, her skin unmarred by any veins visible beneath it.

When he bent his head closer to her, the warm, damp draft of his breath hitting her skin, she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. "Please be careful. You smell so good to me," she tried to explain as he went stiller. "I would never raise my hand to harm you, but I could do so accidentally. If I lost control, Jasper--"

"What would you do to me?" He was smiling a little, eyeing her frame. She knew he couldn't quite picture the damage she could do to him, so easily. 

"The second person I killed, I ripped her head off. Without even meaning to," Alice confessed. The brutality of this act, so early in her infancy, still haunted her. "She was singing, and I startled her. Scared her," she said in an even softer voice. "She stopped singing and I wanted her to keep going and I reached out my hands--" She extended them, white and delicate as the roses on his table yet so much more lethal than the pistol in his drawer. "I went right through her skin, muscles, bones. I ripped her head off and then I put my mouth on the stump of her neck and drank until all her blood was inside me."

"I've seen more horrible things than that, Alice." He moved around the side of the table, coming closer to her. Her wrists were still wrapped up warm inside his hands. "Done worse things. Not accidentally either. I gave orders that killed my men. And I killed men with my own hands. _Boys._ At the end, the Germans were so desperate, they sent their boys to war. Did you know that? I don't know if they reported it here. What people did to each other over there... The war movies are full of lies too. They never show how it was. You can't smell the bodies stacked up in piles."

"I could kill everyone in this town in a day. I could have destroyed the entire army you fought against."

"Then I wish you had been there to help us."

She shook her head. "It sounds easy, to have us fight your wars, but the blood... All the blood in the battles, if we lack control," she fumbled to a stop. "I had to wait until now, until I was sure I could control myself, before I came to you."

"So you don't want to drink my blood?" 

Alice wondered at him. Her size and her gift gave her more leeway than the rest of the Cullens, made people feel more comfortable with her, but she had revealed herself to be a bloodthirsty predator, and he was still holding onto her, _leaning into her._ Of course, she thought, he was a soldier. He knew how to face an opponent, how to evaluate one. 

"I do," she whispered, ashamed at how strong the desire was now. The sweetness of his breath, those fearless dark eyes. He persisted in standing too close to her, his smell blanketing her senses, smothering her good sense. The morals she absorbed from her years watching the Cullens began to fade away in her mind. 

"You can if you need to," he whispered softly. She stared at his mouth, disbelieving she had seen his lips form those words. "It won't hurt me, will it, if you take a little bit?" He pulled his sleeve up, revealing his wrist. He waved it in front of her face and her head twisted to follow it. His smell was even stronger over his pulse point, she could almost taste it, and she could see the blue of his veins, follow them up to his fingers and down to his elbow, and her whole body swelled with the rush of venom. Her mouth, her breasts, her sex. She shook her head again but he only pressed closer. 

"Go on," he said, his voice low, rasping against her ear. "Put your mouth on me." He pressed it against her and she parted her lips, ravenous. She laved his skin with her tongue, tracing his veins. His pulse started to throb in rhythm with the hollowing of her thin cheeks, like they shared some strange heart. 

Jasper felt goosebumps start at his wrist, travel up his arm to his neck, his back. He was fully aroused only from the sight of her mouth around his wrist, the cold lashings of her tongue against his skin. "Bite me," he told her, halfway between an order and a plea this time. 

She saw the future where she did - a brush of her teeth against his wrist, a little harder than his thin human skin could stand, the gentlest penetration. How his blood would taste like ecstasy in her throat. How blissful it would be to have her thirst quenched by him, to feel all his life burning through her. She would close her eyes, shuddering and pulling more and more out of the cut with her inhuman strength, like slurping the ocean through a straw. Even an ocean's worth of him wouldn't be enough for her.

She blinked herself back to the present - her teeth cradling his skin between them, an instant away from causing that wound.


	4. And we cry Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

"Stop," she groaned, pulling her mouth free, turning her face to the side and panting. She took a step away. This was a torture she had never imagined, to feel his life between her teeth. 

_Humans have no idea how delicate their skin is,_ she thought. _This must be some kind of test, to determine if I'm strong enough..._

"It would be so easy for me to kill you, Jasper. Imagine wandering through a desert for years and years and finding an oasis full of the sweetest water. I'm so thirsty for you," she panted as he shook his head, took a step closer. "Please help me resist." 

"Would I be that great of a loss?"

Her eyes flashed back to his, outraged, but he looked at her and shrugged the worth of his own life away. The next thing he knew, she was standing at his kitchen cabinet, all three of his plates in her small hands. "Never say that to me again," she snarled, and she threw them across the room faster than he could see, and they exploded and she grabbed his arms, turning and twisting him so he avoided being struck by any of the shards. 

When her hands fell away - it had all happened so fast, he felt like he had survived another bombing, like the ones in the war - he saw bits of ceramic covering the floor and the counters. Thanks to her reflexes, he hadn't been cut anywhere and neither had she. 

"Never, Jasper. Never say that to me. Losing you would be the most horrible thing I could imagine." Her eyes were golden flames and he watched, mesmerized, and nodded. 

Even now, she pictured him in her mind as he would be on their wedding day, the way he would stare at her as she walked down the aisle on Carlisle's arm in that humble wooden chapel. How could he think that his death wouldn't be a loss? It would hollow her out, leave her bitter and cold and alone. She never wanted to see her future without him in it.

"What other powers do you have?" he asked, looking around again. The plates are in millions of pieces, no one could repair these if they had a thousand years. 

"Like all of us, I'm very fast and very strong," she told him, still angry. "And quite protective of you, since you are apparently incapable of protecting yourself." 

"I only meant you to--" he started, but she hissed at him, sounding purely demonic and he cut himself off. 

"Why do you have this ridiculous death wish?!" 

He shook his head. "I'm trying to help you, Alice. If you need my blood to live, you can have as much as you would like. You could take a lot without killing me--" 

Alice sighed. "I don't _need_ it, Jasper. We can live off animals. I haven't killed a human in two years," she said proudly. "See my eyes? If I killed people, they would be red instead of gold. Blood red. It's horrid." Carlisle had the most beautiful eyes of any of their kind, the truest gold because he had never known human blood. 

"I can't imagine anything looking bad on you," he interjected. 

"And _if_ I was going to go back to that way of existing," she continued, refusing to be charmed, "I would hardly start with you. You're--" A beat of silence. 

"What?" He watched her with a slow, spreading smile, his voice a dare. Apparently he was determined to strip away all of her secrets. None of this was what she had planned - she was so off-track now, fumbling in the dark.

"You're what I've been waiting for," she told him at last, laying her unguarded heart at his feet. "For so long."

He remembered the letter then, felt it rise to the surface of his mind for the first time in years. "Did you send me a letter on a page from _Jane Eyre_ in 1938?" She nodded again, wary. "How old are you?" 

"I told you the truth, about how I woke up. It was 1920. I've been waiting for you since then." 

"Waiting for me to do what?" He picked up her hand again, squeezed it inside his own.

"I told you. I come to be with you," she whispered. 

He took another step toward her, and another, and she backed up into his kitchen counter, their feet crunching over his plates. He reached behind her and swept the counter clean, leaving his arms around her so she was cocooned against him.

"To be with me. And you knew about me how?" 

"I see the future," she blurted. "I've seen you so, so many times, Jasper Whitlock. I've waited for you since 1920! And you stand here and tell me to drink of you so _I_ won't die. Ridiculous foolhardy man." She clenched her tiny jaw and jutted her chin up at him. It was just like him, Alice fumed, to offer his life up to her so she could survive. She swallowed, still tasting his skin inside her mouth. She was on that edge between desire and satiation, balancing on a knife honed to the sharpest point by all her years of watching and waiting. 

"So you are a witch after all," he said, smiling like this was funny. "You can tell what's going to happen?"

"In a sense," she hedged. There were things about his future it wasn't right for him to know. There was so much she couldn't tell him yet. "I see options. Our futures change as our minds change. I can tell you it'll snow all night and Fritz will wake up tomorrow with a head cold, but I can't guarantee you he won't decide to play sick and build a snowman with his grandchildren."

"He has grandchildren?"

"Four of them." He was mulling over what she said, so she quickly added, "Don't ask me about your future, Jasper, please."

"I wouldn't think of it." He furrowed his forehead and stared down at her. "I trust you would tell me if I needed to know." He reached to touch her face again and she let his fingers brush her cheek, so very lightly, and then she made herself lean away. He frowned deeper. "There's no danger I can hurt you, is there, Alice?" 

She frowned back at him and shook her head. "Of course not."

"Before, when I went to touch you, you told me to stop. And from the beginning, sometimes I've thought you look at me like you want to touch me, but you can't allow yourself to do so." He was standing before her again and he slowly placed his hands on either side of her, as they had been before, sandwiching her between him and the counter. Her palms began to itch at her side, longing to pull him into her arms, but she is careful to keep still. "I hope you know - I would never raise my hand against you either, Alice. I could never hurt you."

She studied him for a minute and then she broke into laughter, such a delighted sound he couldn't help but smile in return. "Oh, Jasper, I know that! You would break your fingers before you would cause me an instant of pain." Still giggling, she lowered her head and peered up at him from under her eyelashes. "The reason I don't touch you when I want to so much is because, well, you're quite... overwhelming to me like this." 

Jasper blinked at her and then he started to laugh so hard and so long that he had to move away from her and lean over to wheeze. "I'm overwhelming to _you_?" he choked out and Alice folded her arms, amused despite herself.

"Quite," she answered and he looked up at her from where he'd bent over red-faced and teary-eyed. "Why is that so funny?"

He straightened back up and rubbed his eyes dry. "If you think you're overwhelmed, darlin', I should be sprawled out on the floor in a dead faint."

He finished it in his own head: _I'm standing in my kitchen talking to the most beautiful woman in the world, who also happens to be a vampire, and she says she's been waiting for me for twenty-five years because she can see the future. And I've let her drink my blood and told her to kill me because I'd rather live within her than live in this world without her._

Instead he reached over Alice into the cabinet and removed his bottle of vodka. He swigged and then offered it to her. She shook her head, wrinkling her nose. 

"Not as tempting as me?" 

She gave him a look. 

"Sorry, I suppose it's not a joke." 

He looked her over, head to toe. She was wearing stockings again and those ridiculous bow shoes from the other night, the first time he had seen her. He couldn't believe it had only been two days. At least he didn't have to worry about her feet getting cold, given that she was the undead. "Sit on the counter," he told her. 

"Why?" she asked, wary again. 

"Sit there or I'll lift you up." 

"I'd like to see you try," she snorted. 

She was so small she was practically pocket-sized and she wanted to see him try. Very well. He stuck his hands under her arms and went to lift her, then blanched. 

"I told you," she retorted, but her eyes were shining again, her previous anger replaced by the gnawing need he had seen on her face when he kissed her. Twenty-five years of waiting. No wonder she had looked at him so greedily from the first. He had known her for three days and he was already sick of waiting and standing on ceremony. What can he offer her, if she won't take his blood?

He set his feet and put his whole body into it and managed to heave her up and toss her onto his narrow kitchen counter. She looked impressed and he paused to breathe deep for a minute. She was heavier than some men he had carried in the war with full packs of supplies on their backs. 

"So you've been waiting for me for 25 years?" he asked as he caught his breath.

"Yes. There is a time for everything, Jasper, and I had to wait until now to come to you." He was touching her legs, wrapping his huge hands around her calves, seeming not to care about her cold skin. She set her hands on his broad shoulders, careful to keep her touch light. She would be so cold when he took his body away, cold like she hadn't felt ever before.

"It was rather ungentlemanly of me to leave you waiting for so long, wasn't it, Alice?" he asked, giving her the grin that had worked on girls back when he cared about such things. 

"I suppose so," she said, a little unsure, her eyes wider and lighter than ever. "Of course you didn't know I was waiting." 

"But you were." He slipped his hands under the skirt of her dress, ran his thumbs over her kneecaps and let his fingers brush over the sensitive skin behind her knees. She shivered so hard her shoulders jumped and her mouth opened. "Waiting. And now your wait is over, isn't it? I haven't been a disappointment to you thus far, have I?"

"Of course not," Alice answered. "You are exactly as I envisioned you to be."

He snorted out a breath, leaned forward and kissed the tip of her chin. She's so thin the bone is sharply pointed and makes her face into a narrow heart. "Do you want me to stop?" he breathed as he slowly moved away.

"No," she smiled, meeting his eyes boldly, wanting whatever he would offer her, wanting to give him all of herself in return. He already has her within his grasp, he only has to close his fingers around her, learn how she feels inside his hand. It was a lesson they'd both enjoy.

"I could crush your skull without even meaning to," she warned him and he shook his head and grinned again, apparently unconcerned. 

"Then put your hands on the cabinet behind you. Over your head. Here," he reached up and guided her hands, placed her palms flat above her head. He ran his hands down her arms and over her shoulders to her chest. He found her nipples and pinched them through the fabric of her dress and her hands spasmed, rising an inch off the wood. "Keep your hands like that, Alice." 

"You give me a lot of orders," she breathed, his fingers teasing her tender flesh until she felt like her body was stretched on a rack made of fire and longing. She fought the urge to wrap her legs around him because she knew having his body so tight against her would carry her away and she would destroy him. Break his hips and his pelvis and leave him twisted on the floor. It was hell, trying to be so gentle with him. She had to be cautious when he was so breakable, when so much of him was already broken, and a part of her longed for how it would be in the future, when they could be quick and wicked and rough with each other. 

"You like it. And I have no doubt you'll give me your share in the future," he murmured, lowering his head to suck one small breast into his mouth. He bit her so very gently, his teeth barely strong enough to indent her skin, and she knew she would feel cold to him, but he only licked her before pulling back to study the effect of his ministrations - her nipple pearled tight in the wet circle his mouth had left over her breast. She had never been so sensitive, so swollen. His left hand had never paused in its torture and he turned his gaze to her other breast, pushing his fingers beneath it and lifting it up, like it was begging for the heat of his mouth.

"You don't wear a brassiere, do you?" he remarked, almost casual in his tone if his eyes hadn't been so hot and his fingers so greedy as they rolled her nipple between them, feeling it grow firmer and harder. "I suppose you don't need one. You're breathtaking, Alice. I don't think I've ever seen a more perfect thing than you." 

His hands felt like paws against her, unwieldy and barbaric, like he was trying to capture a sunbeam or a sigh. For all she didn't want to destroy him with her strength and speed, he wanted her to only know pleasure and joy from his hands. Not the hands of a killer, a destroyer, not for her, but the hands of a man, a man who--

He cut off his train of thought. She was strong and beautiful, a sainted queen who should have offerings piled at her feet. What could there be between them, really, when he was a mangled mess, useless and poor and ugly?

"I feel cold to you," she moaned, feeling ridiculous, pressing her hands so hard into the cabinets that the wood groaned louder than she did. She arched her back closer and he leaned closer, nuzzling his face against her chest again. "You don't mind it, do you? It doesn't hurt you-- or scare you?"

"No," he whispered, pressing a line of kisses up her neck. She felt like chilled silk against his mouth. Her thin body sat in front of him like a present, the knobs of her spine curving under his hands like the road to forever. "I told you, you're perfection. Even cold as you are. You're the only thing I've wanted in so long, Alice." 

He paused a moment before he pressed his lips against hers, waiting for her to nod and open her mouth. He closed his eyes when he smelled her breath, groaned. They moved together, her cheeks hollowing as she tasted the sweetness of his smell again. It was so much more than his chaste kiss the day before and she felt her venom filling her own mouth, his tongue tasting it. He shuddered against her and his hands rose to her head, holding her close. He didn't breathe, which should have worried her, but he bent his head lower, licking up into her mouth, and all thoughts fell away so there was only feeling. 

It wasn't so different from feeding - it was done by instinct, rising and falling, the wet sounds their mouths made in the quiet room, the divine drugging pleasure as his heat flooded through her. His tongue tasted hers in the dark secret place created between their lips and he kept touching her, scrawling his name across her skin with every circle over her waist and her hips, every caress of her chest and her neck. She felt the mark of his possession in every pore and she gloried in it.

The mutual possession was incontrovertible, something programmed in their cells from the moment they were created in their mother's wombs - whoever her mother had been. As long as there was a Jasper and an Alice, they belonged together.

He finally broke away to inhale, almost bending over to fill his lungs with oxygen. This time it was pure lust, not laughter, that had stolen his breath. He kept his hands on her cheeks and she kept her eyes closed inside his grasp, weaker and hungrier than she had ever been in her life. 

"You taste... warm. Like burning," he said and he swallowed hard, bending to press his head against her thighs. Her dress was rucked up high enough that he could kiss her skin above the tops of her stockings. She was as smooth and flawless as pearls shaped by eons of water. 

"It's my venom," she panted, her hands twitching against the cabinets. It's almost impossible for her to hold her hands there, only the thought of her fingers hurting him forced her to do it. He had no care for his safety, but to her that was paramount. 

"What does that do?" he asked, his face moving higher, into the cradle of her thighs, dragging the fabric of her dress up with his mouth. His hands were still cradling her cheeks, his fingers in her hair and his thumbs sweeping over her face, again and again. He placed hard open-mouthed kisses against the lace and silk covering her, his tongue hot and avaricious as it darted out to taste her, and her fingers went through the wood of his cabinets, splintering it into shards. 

"Nothing - I would have to bite you, your bloodstream..." Her words come out slow and soft, but then they reminded her of what was coming for him, the future she saw looming larger before them with every passing second. "We should stop," she gasped, with the words in her throat begging him not to stop, but to spread her legs wider and let him uncover her and please her. It felt like boiling water poured through her when he did, hot formless liquid pleasure that shaped itself around his name and his body. 

He ran his tongue over her again, the soaked material of her panties, and he growled, actually growled, when he tasted the venom around her opening. His hands came down to her thighs, marking her porcelain skin with his dirty fingernails. She had parted her legs enough that he found her swollen, aching clitoris with his fingers, his mouth blowing a slow stream of warmth against it. She came in a devastating wave of pleasure, his name sighed into the air before her mouth opened in a silent O of pleasure. 

After a moment, she pulled her fingers out of his cabinets slowly. The fronts were completely mangled, each showing five oval gouges where her fingers had dug. 

"Stay tonight," he whispered against her stomach, winding his arms around her. He had never felt so warm before, even pressed against her cool form. His happiness was simply from her taste inside him, spiced and floral like her smell, and the memory of the way she had looked inside his hands, the sounds she had made because of him. He had given her a few moments of joy. It was a humble gift, but the only thing he could really give her, save the blood she was determined not to take. 

"I can't. I have to go. I'm sorry," she gently stroked his head, that white patch of hair, the small lumps and scars and imperfections of his human form. "Thank you, my dearest one."

His eyes stung at her endearment. He raised his head and stared at her, searching for a term that would be large enough to encompass her, this tiny, glowing presence before him. He saw her eyes fix on his mouth, her face brightening with the smuggest grin he had ever seen. "What?" he asked, and she met his eyes. 

"My venom is all over your mouth," she said, sounding supremely satisfied. 

"Is it?" He grinned in response. He ran the back of his hand over his mouth but there was nothing on it when he studied his skin. 

"Your eyes aren't strong enough to see," she told him. "But right there," she stroked a finger against his bottom lip. "Silver." She showed it to him and he saw only the faintest glimpse of sparkle out of the corner of his eye. "It's so beautiful on you," she told him, tilting her head back and committing it to memory. 

"Not as beautiful as you," he said, swiping his thumb over the space between her thin, dark eyebrows. It fit perfectly in the tiny space. _Does she notice how well we fit together,_ he wondered. _How her curves and edges seem to fit so perfectly against me? Does that seem as much a miracle to her as it is to me?_

"I would-- touch you as you touched me," she told him, lightly running her own hands down his chest. He was drawn up so tight he throbbed with every breath he took. Even her whisper-light touches were almost enough to set him off. "But--"

"I remember," he responded wryly. "You just told me you could crush my skull by accident." 

She winced. "Yes. I would try to be gentle, but-- I've never, so--"

"It's fine, Alice," he hastened to reassure her. 

She nodded. "I'm sorry about your apartment," she said. 

"Oh." He looked around at the rubble of the plates, the ruined cabinets, as if seeing it for the first time. "Yes. I suppose I should care about this - but somehow I don't."

She shook her head as she pushed him away, jumped down to the floor as graceful as a snowflake spinning to the earth. "And I'm sorry to do this, but I have to leave."

"Back to your coffin?"

She rolled her eyes at his teasing. "Those movies, Jasper, _really_. Of course I don't sleep in a coffin! I don't sleep at all-- none of us do." 

He bent to kiss her once more, lightly, and when she looked at him, something uneasy went through her eyes. He was suddenly terrified that she would disappear as soon as she left him, that this had all been some kind of experiment or test on her part, and now she would whisk herself out of his life. "Will I see you tomorrow?" 

"Of course," she smiled, trying to make her eyes light and happy. 

_He will but he won't know it,_ she thought.

They kissed all the way to the door, their hands twined together. She imagined his fingers were tiny bird's eggs so she wouldn't break them and she imagined how their next kiss would be so she wouldn't bite down on his lips. This was the last time she would feel his warm human breath against her face, the last time she could see the way his face pinked a little bit when he kissed her. 

It broke her heart but it healed it too. Alice knew better than anyone the inevitability of the path ahead. She only regretted the pain, the possibility - however slim - of her own failure.

"Tomorrow?" he asked her again, studying her face for any signs she would break her promise.

"Tomorrow," she answered.

He squeezed her fingers again and she felt how cold his hands had grown just from holding hers. It would cause him pain later, his poor fingers, so she lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it, then let him go and opened the door. 

"Alice, I--," he whispered to her as she slipped out his door, her body going still in the blackness of the hallway. He doesn't know how to say it. "I'll see you tomorrow." 

"You will," she whispered back. He can't see her eyes, but they were joyous and wistful at the same time. "You're my first and last, Jasper." 

He laid in bed, feeling at peace for the first time in years. He finished himself thinking of her, gasping her name, and that lulled him to sleep. He could smell her, still taste her in his throat. He should be worried about the future, what he could give her to make her stay, what it meant to be human, hell, even about the state of his apartment. But all he could feel was a growing certainty that this was the life he was meant for. And gratitude that she had come for him at last. 

At 4am, his phone rang and he startled awake from a dream of her leaning over him, her kisses on his eyelids. Phone calls at this hour could only mean one thing. 

He dressed quickly and drove down to the bar Harrison favored. He was sprawled drunk across a table, vomit on his shoes. No new bruises - at least that was something. 

"Come on, Harrison," he muttered, slinging his limp body over his shoulder and carrying him out. It was hard to do with his leg in the state it was in, but Harrison was lighter than Alice, even at six feet tall. He settled him in the car and started to speed home, but not far from the bar, another driver veered into their lane right on top of them. 

In a flash, he saw the headlights and thought of Alice's voice, the certainty in it when she had said, "My first and last." He closed his eyes and let the light come. 

The steering wheel crushed Jasper's chest. His sternum fractured, rupturing his aorta, and the shards of his broken ribs were driven into his lungs until they punctured. 

Harrison flew out of the car and cracked his skull open on the pavement. He died almost instantly. 

In the moment before the other drivers and pedestrians make their way over to the car, Alice darted out of the alley where she had waited since leaving Jasper. She grabbed him up, and scurried away. 

The future flashed through her head as she climbed the ledge to her hotel room, the one she had been staying in for weeks waiting for this moment. It was only feet from the crash site but the life was fleeing from him so quickly. She moved faster than she ever had, hearing his heartbeat in her ears. 

The witnesses who thought there were two people in the car would be easily convinced they were mistaken. Everyone at the bar was drunk, and who's to say they didn't get tonight confused with a different night. Jasper must have loaned his friend his car and Harrison drove himself home.

Soon she will return to Jasper's house and steal his gun, leave a suicide note penned in his handwriting. Everyone will believe the death of his final soldier was too much for him, especially combined with the scene of destruction of his home. They will say he did away with himself, deep in the woods. He will never be found, of course.

But that night, she laid him out on the bed, crawling over him and kissing his eyelids, his jaw, on her way to his heart. "I'm sorry for the pain, Jasper," she whispered. "You've already suffered so much in this life. You are to be forged in fire." 

She paused before she put her lips to his chest. He was the first and last person she would ever turn. There was always a chance she would fail, that she would take every last bit of blood from him, leaving her venom no chance to work its agonizing magic. She spent enough time with him in his human form to shrink the odds of this to only three percent. As before, she thinks three percent is small, except when it means his life.

"Please, please, if I can do anything, allow me to do this," she begged whatever was listening, above or below this fragile world. "If I can only have one thing, _let it be him."_

Then she bit him, her pearly teeth sinking through his skin, ripping into his arteries, and her venom darted into his blood, primed for it from the first time she had seen him. She drank him, gulp after gulp, the most wonderful feeling she ever had - feeling his energy pulse inside her, the satiation of twenty-five years of clawing loneliness. 

_He was meant for you. Taste him, that sweetness you longed for, all the world has denied you,_ her brain whispered. _Keep drinking._

It was Jasper's pain that distracted her from her own blissful relief, his first hoarse gasp when the venom began to overpower his blood. She pulled away, flung herself to the other side of the room and made herself lie flat on the floor, her head pressed down until she could see him in her mind again, as he would be once he was turned. Until all she could hear was his voice whispering his love for her. Then she lifted her head.

He was in horrible pain now, but he would live. She had not failed.

It lasted a day and a half, his body wracked with spasms, his eyes wild and blind. He didn't know she was there, even as he screamed her name. He was cooling, his skin changing, and she tracked the warmth as it disappeared from his body, kissing it goodbye as it left forever. 

When it was over, she pressed herself closer, no longer worried about making him cold, no longer afraid of hurting him at all. He was much stronger than her now, though their bodies were equally unbreakable.

He woke up with her head on his chest, her face watching him. She was the first thing he saw with his newborn eyes. 

"I'm sorry for the pain, but now it's over."

He stared at her, then sat up, slowly. "I'm finally dead then," he said, studying his own skin, seeing the similarity to hers. Then it hit him, what he had been doing, the ride to the bar and the headlights in his face. "Harrison?" he asked her and she shook her head, her eyes still dark gold with worry.

"He's gone. I'm sorry," she said again, as he closed his own eyes, his head falling low. "His funeral was today. You have to feed first, but then we can go to his grave if you like."

He opened his eyes after a long moment, nodded. "All right," he answered with a nod. He rose and tested his leg, his fingers, his collarbone, his ankle. 

"Your wounds are gone," she told him and he reached his hand down, feeling his leg, smooth and unmarred. He nodded again, cataloguing the lack of pain. 

"Are you angry?" She caught her breath, waiting for him to answer.

He didn't hurt anymore, his body felt... untethered. The pain that bound him to the world was gone; he felt stronger than he ever had, so powerful it almost frightened him. The release of his physical pain was a staggering joy and for that alone, he owed her everything. 

"No, Alice. I'm not angry." He reached out his hand and she took it. Their fingers locked together and it is a long time before they can pull them apart.

She took him to the woods outside the city, watched him kill a wolf. She wasn't terribly hungry, she reassured him when he looked back at her. It was dark by then so she led him to the graveyard. Harrison hadn't been buried, the snow was too deep and the ground was too hard, but there were flowers in the snow where the service had been held. He would be buried with the first frost in the spring, his full name and military rank carved in marble, but she and Jasper would be long gone by then. 

Jasper knelt in the snow and she moved to kneel beside him, his face as pale and cold as the white expanse beneath them. The houses around the cemetery were decorated with lights for Christmas but the peace in this place was a cold kind, unforgiving and fierce. 

"There was no future where he lived," she whispered into the icy wind. "There was nothing anyone could do for him in any world." 

In some worlds, he and Jasper died in a bar fight, walking into a robbery in a store, in an huge explosion at the brewery, in a four-car accident when their car careened off the bridge. In all of them, Harrison went fast and peaceful. This accident had been the one with the fewest casualties - only Harrison was killed. One day Jasper will rest his head in her lap and she will tell him all these stories, all the different paths that might have led him to her arms in another life.

"I hope you are finally at peace, Harrison. You were a good man, a good friend to me in the darkest times. I'm sorry I couldn't save you. I tried as hard as I could. Alice tried. She's the best of this world, Harrison." He stared at the flowers, the roses and poinsettas in the snow, but Alice watched his face and felt her soul blooming like those flowers. She was sure if she opened her mouth, petals would pour onto the ground around them. She felt all her love, the decades behind her and the centuries to come, taking root inside him. 

He was hers now-- and he knew it. 

"It isn't fair that I am rewarded with her light and her joy, and you get this silent rest. But I can't wish it was different." He finally looked over to her, raising his bare hand to trace her lips again. He was right, she thought, as he kept his eyes on hers. Red eyes were beautiful, at least on him. Her beloved was carved from roses and snow and sunlight. "I can't wish it was different because I'm in love with her.

"Forgive me for that, too, for how happy she will make me, how I will become a better man for her. I wish your future could have been different, brother. I'll wish that forever, for you and Mills and Deschamps and O'Brien and Travis, for my own brother. I have no wishes remaining for myself, save to please my wife. All my other wishes I press into her hands. My love and my eternity," he vowed to her, kneeling in the snow. 

She kissed him as snowflakes fell around them, as they clung to their clothes and their hair, looking like the feathers from angel's wings. "I love you, Jasper. Welcome to our eternity," she whispered. 

"An eternity with you." He rubbed her cheeks, amazed at how much more sensitive his fingertips were now. Her skin was even more flawless than he had been able to detect as a human, her mouth softer and more subtly colored, a million variations of pink and red. Her eyes, the colors and the visions and the love inside them -- they were all far beyond any words he could find. "An eternity to belong to each other."

"Yes," she murmured. She touched him in turn, that broad, strong body she had longed for all these decades, the one she would spend forever nestling into. His long bones and wide-palmed hands, the fingers that would always touch her face with reverence. His lean face, those impossibly soft lips that looked so serious to everyone else, the light brown slashes of his eyebrows, his hair with that patch that shone white like the snow. "You'll know me better than anyone, just as I know you. Even better than Edward."

He raised an eyebrow. "Edward? How many people do you have visions of?"

"A few. I haven't met any of them yet, but we'll find them together. A whole family for us. I have so much more to tell you, Jasper."

He thumbed her lips to feel her grin and then kissed her lightly. The sensation was so intense to both of them, now that they were both changed, they both squeezed their eyes shut and shuddered through it. "That's different," he whispered at last and she nodded. 

"Better like this, isn't it? Now you know how I felt. I told you, your blood overwhelmed me as a human. Now all I want is your touch."

He feathered his fingers through her hair, cupped her head like he could feel the dreams inside it rising against his palm. "Yes, I know. I think I'll have to lay my lips on you a hundred times a day for the rest of eternity," he whispered. "If you'll allow it." 

"Jasper," she smiled. Love in a snowy graveyard - love from death. "That's what I've been waiting for."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Xmas aka Happy December 25th, y'all! <3


End file.
